Thursday, August 12, 2010

php-5.2.14 USE flag clarification

This is in response to a rescue operation I did yesterday evening, after being notified of Bug #332257. In essence, I've failed to include two USE flags (force-cgi-redirect and discard-path) which should have been there and castrated a third one (cgi).

I snuck those missing two back in and fixed USE="cgi" to also enable fastcgi, like 5.2.13 did. So if your FastCGI setup stopped working after an upgrade to 5.2.14, please resync and remerge php-5.2.14, the regression has been fixed.

A friendly user also asked me about some other changes, I only then realized I failed to document: the sybase, java-external and fastbuild USE flags are gone from 5.2.14. You'll notice that they also don't appear on php-5.3.3. This has a reason, which is probably only appearent if you follow php-bugs@gentoo.org on our Bugzilla, so here goes:

sybase

... was dropped when Bug #281316 came up. I learned that sybase-ct as provided by dev-db/freetds is a near complete stand-in for sybase. If the "near complete" doesn't work for you and you need sybase back, please comment below. But note PHP-5.3 has dropped support for that extension, so you'll need to find another way, anyway.

java-external

... has never done much to the PHP build - it only pulled in dev-php5/php-java-bridge and enabled USE="session". Now, the java-bridge package has not been available in our tree since 2007 and the official status of the "java" extension according to the PHP manual is unmaintained and dead. So I decided to drop this. If you need Java support, please head over to Zend, but I've no experience with their Java stuff, so I can't comment further.

fastbuild

... was an experimental patch to the PHP build system I dropped in a bid to provide a more "vanilla" PHP. To be honest, it wasn't in hoffies eblits for PHP-5.3, as the patch would have probably needed modifications to it in several places. And I was not in favor of adding another eblit to accomodate PHP-5.2 here. To be even more honest, I'm scared by PHP's build system so much I want to destroy and rebuild it from the ashes